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* * * Info * * *
Author: Del Rey, Lester
Title: Police Your Planet
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Copyright: Original copyright by Erik van Lhin, 1956. 1975 by Random House, Inc. Abridged version
published by Avalon Books, 1956. Shorter serialised version in Science Fiction Adventures, Future
Publications, Inc., 1953.
Printing: First, 05/1975. Second, 11/1981.
ISBN: 0-345-29858-6
Version history:
v1.0: Proof completed on 22/02/2006. Some obvious typographical errors in the original scan of the
treeware have been corrected, but the author’s version has been respected in all other matters.
Dedication
To JAMES BLISH
Who understood the intent
despite the content.
Back cover
UNDER THE DOME OF MARS
It was the biggest dome ever built, large enough to cover all of Marsport before the slums sprawled out
beyond it. The dome covered half the city, making breathing possible inside without a helmet.
But it wasn’t designed to stand stray bullets, and having firearms inside—except for a few chosen
men—was a crime punishable by death!
Suddenly Gordon heard a noise…someone was shooting at him!
* * * Text begins * * *
There were ten passengers in the little pressurized cabin of the electric bus that shuttled between the
rocket field and Marsport. Ten men, the driver—and Bruce Gordon!
He sat apart from the others, as he had kept to himself on the ten-day trip between Earth and Mars,
with the yellow stub of his ticket still defiantly in the band of his hat, proclaiming that Earth had paid his
passage without his permission being asked. His big, lean body was slumped slightly in the seat. Gray
eyes stared out from under black brows without seeing the reddish-yellow sand dunes slipping by. There
was no expression on his face. Even the hint of bitterness at the corners of his mouth was gone now.
He listened to the driver explaining to a couple of firsters that they were actually on what appeared to
be one of the mysterious canals when viewed from Earth. Every book on Mars gave the fact that the
canals were either an illusion or something which could not be detected on the surface of the planet.
Gordon lost interest in the subject, almost at once.
He glanced back toward the rocket that still pointed skyward back on the field, and then forward
toward the city of Marsport, sprawling out in a mass of slums beyond the edges of the dome that had
been built to hold air over the central part. And at last he stirred and reached for the yellow stub.
He grimaced at the ONE WAY stamped on it, then tore it into bits and let the pieces scatter over the
floor. He counted them as they fell; thirty pieces, one for each year of his life. Little ones for the two
years he’d wasted as a cop. Shreds for the four years as a kid in the ring before that—he’d never made
the top, though it had taken enough time getting rid of the scars from it. Bigger bits for two years also
wasted in trying his hand at professional gambling; they hadn’t made him a fortune, but they’d been fun at
the time. And the six final pieces that spelled his rise from a special reporter helping out with a police
shake-up coverage through a regular leg-man turning up rackets, and on up like a meteor until he was the
paper’s youngest top man, and a growing thorn in the side of the government. He’d made his big scoop,
all right. He’d dug up enough about the Mercury scandals to double circulation.
And the government had explained what a fool he’d been for printing half of a story that was never
supposed to be printed until it could all be revealed. They’d given him his final assignment, escorted him
to the rocket, and explained just how many grounds for treason they could use against him if he ever tried
to come back without their invitation.
He shrugged. He’d bought a suit of airtight coveralls and a helmet at the field. He had enough to get by
on for perhaps two weeks. And he had a set of reader cards in his pocket, in a pattern which the supply
house Earthside had assured him had never been exported to Mars. With them and the knife he’d
selected, he might get by.
The Solar Security office had given him the knife practice to make sure he could use it, just as they’d
made sure he hadn’t taken extra money with him beyond the regulation amount.
“You’re a traitor, and we’d like nothing better than seeing your guts spilled,” the Security man had told
him. “That paper you swiped was marked top secret. When we’re trying to build a Solar Federation
from a world that isn’t fully united, we have to be rough. But we don’t get many men with your
background—cop, tin-horn, fighter—who have brains enough for our work. So you’re bound for Mars,
rather than the Mercury mines. If…”
It was a big if, and a vague one. They needed men on Mars who could act as links in their information
bureau, and be ready to work on their side when the trouble they expected came. They could see what
went on, from the top. But they wanted men planted in all walks, where they could get information when
they asked for it. Trouble was due—overdue, they felt—and they wanted men who could serve them
loyally, even without orders. If he did them enough service, they might let him back to Earth. If he caused
trouble enough to bother them, they could still help him to Mercury.
“And suppose nothing happens?” he asked.
“Then who cares? You’re just lucky enough to be alive,” the agent told him flatly.
“And what makes you think I’m going to be a spy for Security?”
The other had shrugged. “Why not, Gordon? You’ve been a spy for six years now—against the
crooked cops and tin-horns who were your friends, and against the men who’ve tried to make something
out of man’s conquest of space. You’ve been a spy for a yellow scandal sheet. Why not for us?”
It had been a nasty fight, while it lasted. And maybe he was here only because the other guy had proved
a little faster with the dirtiest punches. Or maybe because Gordon had been smart enough to realize that
Security was right—his background might be useful on Mars. Useful to himself, at least.
They were in the slums around the city now. Marsport had been settled faster than it was ready to
receive colonists. Temporary buildings had been thrown up and then had remained, decaying into
death-traps, where the men whose dreams had gone seethed and died in crowded filth. It wasn’t a pretty
view that visitors got as they first reached Mars. But nobody except the romantic fools had ever thought
frontiers were pretty.
The drummer who had watched Gordon tear up his yellow stub moved forward now, his desire to
make an impression stronger than his dislike of the other. “First time?” he asked, settling his fat little
carcass into the seat beside the larger man.
Gordon nodded, mentally cataloguing the drummer as to social, business, and personal life. The
cockroach type, midway between the small-businessman slug and the petty-crook spider types that
weren’t worth bothering with. He could get along without the last-minute pomposity.
But the other took it as interest. “Been here dozens of times myself. Risking your life, just to go into
Marsport. Why Congress doesn’t clean it up, I’ll never know! But business is business, I always say. It’s
better under the dome than out here, though. Last time I was here, they found a whole gang outside the
dome selling human meat. Absolutely. And cheaper than real meat.”
Gordon grunted. It was the usual untrained fool’s garbled account. He’d heard about it on the paper.
Some poor devil had taken home a corpse to a starving family out of sheer desperation. Something about
the man having come out to Mars because one of his kids had been too weak for Earth gravity, to open a
cobbling shop here. Then he’d fallen behind in his protection payments and had tried one of the cheap
gambling halls to make good. The paper’s account hadn’t indicated what happened to the family after
they hung him, but a couple of the girls had been almost pretty. Maybe they’d been able to live.
Gordon’s mind switched from gambling to the readers in his bag. He had no intention of starving
here—nor staying, for that matter. The cards were plastic, and should be good for a week or so of use
before they showed wear. During that time, by playing it carefully, he should have his stake. Then, if the
gaming tables here were as crudely run as an old-timer he’d known on Earth had said, he could try a
coup. If it worked, he’d have enough to open a cheap-john joint of his own, maybe. At least, that’s what
he’d indicated to the Security men.
But the price of bribing a ship to take him back to Earth without a card came to about the same figure,
and there were plenty of ways of concealing himself, once he got back…
“…be at Mother Corey’s soon,” the fat little drummer babbled on. “Notorious—worst place on Mars.
Take it from me, brother, that’s something! Even the cops are afraid to go in there. Seven hundred to a
thousand of the worst sort—See it? There, to your left!”
The name was vaguely familiar as one of the sore spots of Marsport. Gordon looked, and spotted the
ragged building, half a mile outside the dome. It had been a rocket maintenance hangar once, then had
been turned into a temporary dwelling for the first deportees when Earth began flooding Mars. Now,
seeming to stand by habit alone, it radiated desolation and decay.
Sudden determination crystalized in Gordon’s mind. He’d been vaguely curious as to whether the
Security boys would have a spotter on his movements. Now he knew what to do about it—and this was
as good a spot to start as any.
He stood up, grabbing for his bag, and spinning the fat thighs of the suddenly squealing drummer aside
with a contemptuous shove. He jerked forward, and caught the driver’s shoulder. “Getting off!” he
announced.
The driver shrugged his hand away. “Don’t be crazy, mister! They…” He turned and saw it was
Gordon. His face turned blank, even though there was no yellow card for his eyes to study now. “It’s
your life, buster,” he said, and reached for the brake. “I’ll give you five minutes to get into coveralls and
helmet and out through the airlock.”
Gordon needed less than that. He’d practiced all the way from Earth, knowing there might be times
when speed in getting into the airtight clothing would count. The transparent plastic of the coveralls went
on easily enough, and his hands found the seals quickly. He slipped his few possessions into a bag at his
belt, slid the knife into a spring holster above his wrist, and picked up the bowl-shaped helmet. It seated
on a plastic seal and the little air-compressor at his back began to hum, ready to turn the thin wisp of
Mars’ atmosphere into a barely breathable pressure. He tested the Marspeaker—an amplifier and
speaker in another pouch, designed to raise the volume of his voice to a level where it would carry
through even the air of Mars.
The driver swore at the lash of sound, and grabbed for the airlock switch. Gordon barely had time to
jerk through the form-hugging plastic orifice before it snapped shut behind him. Then the bus left him. He
didn’t look back, but headed for the wreck of a building that was Mother Corey’s.
He moved down unpaved streets that zig-zagged along, thick with the filth of garbage and poverty—the
part of Mars never seen in the newsreels, outside the shock movies. Thin kids with big eyes and sullen
mouths crowded the streets in their airsuits, shouting profanity. Around a corner, he heard yelling, and
swung over to see a man beating a coarsely fat woman who was obviously his wife. The street was filled
with people watching with a numbed hunger for any kind of excitement
It was late afternoon, obviously. Men were coming from the few bus routes, lugging tools and lunch
baskets, slumped and beaten from labor in the atomic plants, the Martian conversion farms, and the
industries that had come inevitably where inefficiency was better than the high prices of imports. They
were sick men, sick down inside themselves, going home to the whining of wives and the squabbling of
their unwanted children; they were sicker because they knew themselves for failures, and could not deny
the truth of the nagging accusations of their families.
The saloons were doing well enough, apparently, judging by the number that streamed in through their
airlock entrances. But Gordon saw one of the barkeepers paying money to a thick-set rat with an
arrogant sneer, and he knew that the few profits from the cheap beer were never going home with the
owner. Storekeepers in the cheap little shops had the same lines on their faces as they saw on the faces
of their customers.
Poverty and misery were the keynotes here, rather than the vicious evil half-world the drummer had
babbled about. But to Gordon’s trained eyes, there was plenty of outright rottenness, too. There were
the young punks on the corners, eyeing him as he passed, and the furtive glances of women coming out
early to begin their emotionless rounds. Here and there, men with the ugly smirks of professional tough
guys lounged in front of taverns or barber-shops. Gordon passed a rickety old building where a group
inside were shooting craps or working on their knives and bludgeons. If it was a gang hideout, there was
no hiding involved. He saw two policemen, in what seemed like normal police clothes except for their
bowl-helmets; the aspirators and speakers were somehow built in, and unnoticeable. But they passed the
hideout without a look, and stalked down the street while sullen eyes followed them.
He grimaced, grateful that the supercharger on his airsuit filtered out some of the smell which the thin air
carried. He had thought he was familiar with human misery from his own Earth slum background. But
there was no attempt to disguise it here—no vain flowers withering in windows, no bravado from anyone
who was growing up to leave all this behind. This was dead end.
It grew quiet then, until he could hear the hissing of the compressor in his suit. Life here would depend
on that sound. Great atomic machines had been digging through the Martian deserts for nearly a century,
cracking
oxygen out of the red sands. But the air was still too thin to breathe without compression.
The crowded streets thinned out now, and the buildings were older—so battered and weathered that
not even the most abject wage-earner could stand them. A few diseased beggars lounged about, and a
scattering of too-purposeful men moved along. But it was a quiet section, where toughness was taken for
granted, and no smirk was necessary to prove a man’s rise to degradation.
Ahead, Mother Corey’s reared up—a huge, ugly half cylinder of pitted metal and native bricks,
showing the patchwork of decades, before repairs had been abandoned.
There were no windows,
though there had once been. And the front was covered with a big sign that spelled out condemned, in
mockery of the tattered shreds that had once been an official notice. The airseal was filthy, and there was
no bell.
Gordon kicked against the side, waited, and kicked again. A slit opened and closed. He waited, then
drew his knife and began prying at the worn cement around the airseal, looking for the lock that had once
been there.
The seal suddenly quivered, indicating the metal inside had been withdrawn. Gordon grinned tautly,
stepped through, and pushed the blade against the inner plastic.
“All right, all right,” a voice whined out of the darkness. “You don’t have to puncture my seal. You’re
in.”
“Then call them off!”
A wheezing chuckle answered him, and a phosphor bulb glowed weakly, shedding some light on a filthy
hall that led to rickety steps, where four men stood ready to jump downward on the intruder. “Okay,
boys,” the voice said. “Come on down. He’s alone, anyhow. What’s pushing, stranger?”
“A yellow ticket,” Gordon told him. “A yellow ticket and a Government allotment that’ll last me two
weeks in the dome. I figure on making it last six here, until I can shake down and case the lay. And don’t
let my being a firster give you hot palms. My brother was Lanny Gordon!”
That happened to be true, though he hadn’t seen his brother from the time the man had left the family as
a young punk to the day they finally convicted him on his tenth murder and gave him the warming bench
for a twenty-first birthday present But here, if it was like places he’d known on Earth, even second-hand
contact with “muscle” was useful.
It seemed to work. A fat hulk of a man oozed out of the shadows, his gray face contorting its doughy
fat into a yellow-toothed grin, and a filthy hand waved back the other men. There were a few wisps of
long, gray hair on the head and face, and they quivered as he moved forward.
“Looking for a room?” he whined.
“I’m looking for Mother Corey.”
“Then you’re looking at him, cobber,” the grotesque lump of flesh answered. “Sleep on the floor, want
a bunk, squat with four, or room and duchess to yourself?”
There was a period of haggling then, followed by a wait as Mother Corey kicked four grumbling men
out of a four-by-seven hole on the second floor. Gordon’s money had carried more weight than his
brother’s reputation, and for that Corey was willing to humor his insane wish to be completely by himself,
even. He spread a hand out coarsely. “All yours, cobber, while your crackle’s blue.”
It was a filthy, dark place. In one corner was an un-sheeted bed. Marks on the floor showed where
another had been beside it, to house another couple before. There was a rusty bucket for water, a filthy
sink, with a can on the floor for waste water, and a disposal pail that had apparently been used only as a
chair, from the looks and smell of the place. Plumbing and such luxuries hadn’t existed for years, except
for the small cistern and worn water recovery plant in the basement, beside the tired-looking weeds in the
hydroponic tanks that tried unsuccessfully to keep the air breathable.
“What about a lock on the door?” Gordon asked.
“What good would it do you? Got a different way here, we have. One credit a week, and you get
Mother Corey’s word nobody busts in. And it sticks, cobber—one way or the other.”
Gordon paid, and tossed his pouch on the filthy bed. With a little work, the place could be cleaned
enough, and he had a strong stomach. Eating was another matter—there was a section in the back where
thermocapsules could be used to heat food, but…
He pulled the cards out of his pouch, trying to be casual. Mother Corey stood staring at the pack while
Gordon changed out of his airsuit, retching faintly as the full effluvium of the place hit him. “Where does a
man eat around here?” he asked.
Mother Corey pried his eyes off the cards and ran a thick tongue over heavy lips. “Eh? Oh. Eat.
There’s a place about ten blocks back. Cobber, stop teasing me! With elections coming up and the boys
loaded with vote money back in town—with a deck of cheaters like that—you want to eat?”
He picked the deck up and studied the box fondly, while a faraway look came into his clouded eyes.
“Same ones—same identical ones I wore out nigh thirty years ago; Smuggled two decks up here. Set to
clean up—and I did, for a while.” He shook his head sadly, making the thin hairs wave wildly around his
jellied jowls and head, and handed the deck back to Gordon. “Come on down. For the sight of these, I’ll
give you the lay for your pitch. And when your luck’s made or broken, remember Mother Corey was
your friend first, and your old Mother can get longer use from them than you can.”
He waddled off, trailing a cloud of garbage odors and telling of his plans to take Mars for a cleaning,
once long ago. Gordon followed him, staring at the filth around him. Corey’s plans had been about the
same as his present ones, and this was the result: landlord of a crumbling pile of decay, living beyond the
law, and growing old among crooks and riff-raff.
He grimaced. Ten days! He wouldn’t make the mistake of being too greedy. Ten days, and then he’d
make his big pitch.
His thoughts were churning so busily that he didn’t see the blond girl until she had forced her way past
them on the stairs. Then he turned back, but she had vanished into one of the rooms. Anyhow, this was
Mars, and Gordon had no time for by-paths now. Mars! He spat into the moldy dust on the floor and
hurried after Mother Corey.
A lot could be done in ten days, when a man knew what he was after and hated to go back to the place
he called home. It was exactly ten days later when Gordon stood in the motley crowd inside the barnlike
room where Fats ran a bar along one wall and filled the rest of the space with assorted tables, all worn.
Gordon was sweating slightly as he stood at the roulette table where both zero and double-zero were
reserved for the house.
The croupier was a little wizened man wanted on Earth for murder, but not important enough to track
down to Mars. Now it seemed as if he’d soon be wanted here for more of the same, from the looks he
was giving the big, dark man who faced him. His eyes darted down to the point of the knife that showed
under
Gordon’s sleeve, and he licked his lips, showing snaggle teeth. The wheel hesitated and came to a
halt, with the ball trembling in a pocket.
“Twenty-One wins again,” he mouthed, and pushed chips across toward Gordon, as if every one of
them came out of his own pay. “Place your bets.” The words were automatic, now no more than a
conditioned reflex.
Two others around the table watched narrowly as Gordon left his chips where they were; they reached
for their own chips, then exchanged looks and shook their heads. In a Martian roulette game, numbers
with that much riding just didn’t turn up. Some of the others licked eager lips, but the croupier gave them
no time. It was bad enough without more riding on it. Sweat stood out on his head, and he shifted his
weight, then caught the wheel and spun it savagely.
Gordon’s leg ached from his strained position, but he shifted his weight onto it more heavily, and new
spots of sweat popped out on the croupier’s face. His eyes darted down, to where the full weight of
Gordon seemed to rest on the heel that was grinding into his in-step. His eyes flicked to the knife point.
But there was some degree of loyalty in him toward Fats Eller. He tried to pull his foot off the button that
was concealed in the floor.
The heel ground harder, bringing a groan from him. And the ball hovered over Twenty-One and came
to rest there once more.
Slowly, painfully, the little man counted stacks of chips and moved them across the table toward
Gordon, his hands trembling. The sweat began to dry now, and his tongue darted across his broken teeth
in a frenzy.
Gordon straightened from his awkward position, drawing his foot back, and reached out for the pile of
chips. For a second, he hesitated, watching the little man fidget, while he let the knife blade slide out
another quarter inch from his sleeve. Then he scooped it up and nodded. “Okay,” he decided. “I’m not
greedy.”
The strain of watching the games until he could spot the fix and then holding the croupier down had left
him momentarily weak, but he still could feel the tensing of the crowd. Now he let his eyes run over
them—the night citizens of Marsport, lower dome section. Spacemen who’d missed their ships, men
who’d come here with dreams, and stayed without them—the shopkeepers who couldn’t meet their graft
and were here to try to win it on a last chance, street women and petty grifters—those who believed that
a rude interior meant a more honest wheel and those who no longer cared, until their last cent was gone.
The air was thick with the smell of their unwashed bodies—all Mars stank, since water was still too rare
for frequent bathing—and their cheap perfume, while the air was clouded with Marsweed cigarettes. But
thicker than that was a hunger over them—something demanding excitement, and now about to be fed.
Gordon swung where their eyes pointed, until he saw Fats Eller sidling through the groups. The
sour-faced, pudgy man wasn’t happy about the turn of events. His face showed that, together with
determination to do something.
Gordon let, the knife slip into the palm of his hand as the crowd seemed to hold its breath. Fats stared
at it with a half-contemptuous sneer, but made no move to come closer. He plucked a sheaf of Martian
banknotes from his pocket and tossed them to the croupier.
“Cash in his chips,” he ordered harshly. Then his pouchy eyes turned to Gordon. “Get your money,
punk, and get out! And stay out!”
For a moment, as he began pocketing the bills, Gordon thought he was going to get away that easily.
Fats watched him dourly, then swung on his heel, just as a shrill, strangled cry went up from someone in
the crowd.
The deportee let his glance jerk to it, then froze. His eyes caught the sight of a hand pointing behind him,
and he knew it was too crude a trick to bother with. But he paused, shocked to see the girl he’d seen on
Mother Corey’s stairs, gazing at him in well-feigned warning. She looked like a blond angel who had
been out in the rain just long enough to begin tarnishing. But on her, the brassiness of her hair and the
too-experienced pout of her lips looked almost good. Or it could have been the contrast with the blowsy
women around her. Her figure…In spite of his better judgment, it caught his eyes and drew them down
over curves and swells that might be too ripe for Earth fashion, but would always be right for arousing a
man’s passion.
Then he ripped his eyes back to Fats, who had started to turn again. Gordon took a step backward,
preparing to duck. And again the girl’s finger motioned behind him. He disregarded it—and realized
suddenly that his action was a mistake.
It was the faintest swish in the air that caught his ear, and he brought his shoulders up and his head
down, just as the sap struck. Fast as his reaction was, it was almost too late. The weapon crunched
against his shoulder and slammed over the back of his neck, almost knocking him out. But he held his
grip on himself.
His heel lashed back and caught the shin of the man behind him. His other leg spun him around, still
crouching, and the knife in his hand started coming up, sharp edge leading, and aimed for the belly of the
bruiser who confronted him. The pug-ugly saw the blade, and a thick animal sound gurgled from his
mouth, while he tried to check his lunge.
Gordon felt the blade strike, but he was already pulling his swing, and it only sank half an inch, gashing a
long streak that crimsoned behind it. The thug shrieked hoarsely and fell over. That left the way clear to
the door, where the bouncer had been stationed. Gordon was through it and into the night in two soaring
leaps. After only a few days on Mars, his legs were still hardened to Earth gravity, so he had more than a
double advantage over the others.
Outside, it was the usual Martian night in the poorer section of the dome, which meant it was nearly
dark. Most of the street lights had never been installed—graft had eaten up the appropriations,
instead—and the nearest one was around the corner, leaving the side of Fats’ Place in the shadow.
Gordon checked his speed, threw himself flat, and rolled back against the building, just beyond the steps
that led to the street.
Feet pounded out of the door above as Fats and the bouncer broke through. Gordon’s hand had
already knotted a couple of coins in his kerchief. He waited until the two turned uncertainly up the street
and tossed it. It struck the wall near the corner, sailed on, and struck again at the edge of the unpaved
street with a muffled sound.
Fats and the other swung, just in time to see a bit of dust where it had hit. “Around the corner!” Fats
yelled. “After him, and shoot!”
In the shadows, Gordon jerked sharply. It was rare enough to have a gun here. But to use one inside
the dome was unthinkable. His eyes shot up, where the few dim lights were reflected off the great plastic
sheet that was held up by the air pressure and reinforced with heavy webbing. It was the biggest dome
ever built, large enough to cover all of Marsport before the slums sprawled out beyond it; it still covered
half the city, making breathing possible here without a helmet But it wasn’t designed to stand stray bullets,
and having firearms inside it, except for a few chosen men, was a crime punishable by death.
Fats had swung back and was now herding the crowd inside his place. He might have been only a small
gambling-house owner, but within his own circle his words carried weight. They stayed inside, and the
door shut behind them, sealing tightly as doors always sealed, even under the dome.
Gordon got to his hands and knees and began crawling away from the comer. He came to a dark alley,
smelling of decay where garbage had piled up without being carted away. He turned into it, stumbling
over a woman busy rolling a drunk. She darted to the end of the alley, and he moved after her more
slowly. Beyond lay a lighted street, and a sign that announced Mooney’s Amusement Palace—Drinks
Free to Patrons! He snapped a look up and down the street, and walked briskly toward the somewhat
plusher gambling hall there. Fats couldn’t touch him in a competitor’s place.
For a second, he thought he heard steps behind him, but a quick glance back showed nothing. Then he
was inside Mooney’s, and heading quickly for the dice table.
He lost steadily on small bets for half an hour, admiring the skilled palming of the “odds” cubes. The loss
was only a tiny dent in his new pile, but he bemoaned it properly, as if he were broke, and moved over to
the bar. This one had seats. The bartender had a consolation boilermaker waiting for him, and he gulped
half of it down before he realized the beer had been needled with ether. The tastes here were on the
rugged side.
Beside him, a cop was drinking the same, slowly, watching another policeman at a Canfield game. He
was obviously winning, and now he got up and came over to cash in his chips.
“You’d think they’d lose count once in a while,” he complained to his companion. “But nope—fifty
even a night, no more…Well, come on, Pete, we’d better get back to Fats and tell him the swindler got
away.”
Gordon followed them out and turned south, down the street toward the edge of the dome and the
entrance where he’d parked his airsuit and helmet. He kept glancing
back whenever he was in the
thicker shadows, but there seemed to be no one following him, in spite of the itching at the back of his
neck.
At the gate of the dome, he glanced back again, then ducked into the locker building. The money in his
pockets seemed heavier now—something that kept worrying him with every step. For a minute, he
debated going back to register at one of the better hotels in Marsport Center. But too many stories came
into his head. He wasn’t clothed for it, and the odor of bathless living in Mother Corey’s still clung to him.
He’d be immediately suspected there, and it wasn’t too hard to bribe one’s way into a room. A bum with
money had more chances in a place like Mother Corey’s—where the grotesque hulk that ruled the roost
apparently lived up rigidly to the one ethic of his given word.
He threaded through the maze of the lockers with his knife ready in his hand, trying not to attract
suspicion. At this hour, though, most of the place was empty. The crowds of foremen and delivery men
who’d be going in and out through the day were lacking, and there were only a few who crossed the line
from the dome to the slums.
He found his suit and helmet and clamped them on quickly, transferring the knife to its spring sheath
outside the suit. He checked the little batteries that were recharged by tiny generators in the soles of the
boots with every step. Then he paid his toll for the opening of the private slit and went through, into the
darkness outside the dome.
Lights bobbed about—police in pairs patrolling in the better streets, walking as far from the houses as
they could; a few groups, depending on numbers for safety; some of the very poor, stumbling about and
hoping for a drink somehow, sure they had nothing to lose; and probably hoods from the gangs that ruled
the nights here.
Gordon left his torch unlighted, and moved along; there was a little light from the phosphorescent
markers at some of the corners, and from the stars. He could just make his way without marking himself
with a light. And he’d be better able to see any light following him.
Damn it, he should have hired a few of the younger bums from Mother Corey’s—though that might
have been inviting robbery instead of preventing it.
Here he couldn’t hear footsteps, he realized. He located a pair of patrolling cops and followed them
down one street, until they swung off. Then he was on his own again.
“Gov’nor!” The word barely reached him, and he jerked around, the knife twitching into his hand. It
was a thin kid of perhaps twenty years behind him, carrying a torch that was filtered to bare visibility. It
swung up, and he saw a pock-marked face that was twisted in a smile meant to be ingratiating.
“You’ve got a pad on your tail,” the kid said, again as low as his amplifier would permit. “Need a
convoy?”
Gordon studied him briefly, and grinned. Then his grin wiped out as the kid’s arm flashed to his shoulder
and back, a series of quick jerks that seemed almost a blur. Four knives stood buried in the ground at
Gordon’s
feet, forming a square—and a fifth was in the kid’s hand.
“How much?” Gordon asked, as the kid scooped up the blades and shoved them expertly back into
shoulder sheaths. The kid’s hand shaped a C quickly, and Gordon slipped his arm through a self-sealing
slit in the airsuit and brought out two hundred-credit bills.
“Thanks, gov’nor,” the kid said, stowing them away. “You won’t regret it.” He swung his dim light
down, and Gordon started to turn. Then the kid’s voice rose sharply to a yell.
“Okay, honey, he’s the Joe!”
Out of the darkness, ten to a dozen figures loomed up. The kid had jumped aside with a lithe leap, and
now stood between Gordon and the group moving in for the kill. Gordon turned to run, and found himself
surrounded. His eyes flickered around, trying to spot something in the darkness that would give him
shelter.
A bludgeon was suddenly hurtling toward him, and he ducked it, his blood thick in his throat and his
ears ringing with the same pressure of fear he’d always known just before he was kayoed in the ring. But
pacificism would do him no good. He selected what he hoped was the thinnest section of the attackers
and leaped forward. With luck, he might jump over them, using his Earth strength.
There was a flicker of dawn-light in the sky, now, however; and he made out others behind, ready for
just such a move. He changed his lunge in mid-stride, and brought his arm back with the knife. It met a
small round shield on the arm of the man he had chosen, and was deflected at once.
“Give ’em hell, gov’nor,” the kid’s voice yelled, and the little figure was beside him, a shower of blades
seeming to leap from his hand in the glare of his now bare torch. Shields caught them frantically, and then
the kid was in with a heavy club he’d torn from someone’s hand.
Gordon had no time to consider his sudden traitor-ally. He bent to the ground seizing the first rocks he
could find, and threw them. One of the hoods dropped his club in ducking, and Gordon caught it up and
swung in a single motion that stretched the other out.
Then it was a mêlée. The kid’s open torch, stuck on his helmet, gave them light enough, until Gordon
could switch on his own. Then the kid dropped behind him, fighting back-to-back. Something hit his arm,
and Gordon switched the club to his left, awkwardly. He caught a blow on the shoulder, and kicked out
savagely as someone lunged for his feet. Here, in close quarters, the attackers were no longer using
knives. One might be turned on its owner, and a slit suit meant death by asphyxiation.
Gordon saw the blond girl on the outskirts, her face taut and glowing. He tried to reach her with a
thrown club wrested from another man, but she leaped nimbly aside, shouting commands. Nobody paid
any attention, and she began moving in cautiously, half-eager and half-afraid.
Two burly goons were suddenly working together. Gordon swung at one, ducked a blow from the
other, and then saw the first swinging again. He tried to bring his club up—but he knew it was too late. A
dull weight hit the side of his head, and he felt himself falling. This was it, he thought. They’d strip him or
slash his suit—and he’d be dead without knowing he had died. He tried to claw his way to his feet,
hearing a ghost-voice from his past counting seconds. Then he passed out.
It took only minutes for dawn to become day on Mars, and the sun was lighting up the messy section of
back street when Gordon’s eyes opened and the pain of sight struck his aching head. He groaned, then
looked frantically for the puff of escaping air. But his suit was still sealed. Ahead of him, the kid lay
sprawled out, blood trickling from the broken section of an ugly bruise along his jaw.
Then Gordon felt something on his suit, and his eyes darted to hands just finishing an emergency patch.
His eyes darted up and met those of the blond vixen!
Amazement kept him motionless for a second. There were tears in the eyes of the girl, and a sniffling
sound reached him through her Marspeaker. Apparently, she hadn’t noticed that he had revived, though
her eyes were on him. She finished the patch, and ran permasealer over it. Then she began putting her
supplies away, tucking them into a bag that held notes that could only have been stolen from his
pockets—her share of the loot, apparently.
He was still thinking clumsily as she rose to her feet and turned to leave. She cast a glance back,
hesitated, and then began to move off.
He got his feet under him slowly, but he was reviving enough to stand the pain in his head. He came to
his feet, and leaped after her. In the thin air, his lunge was silent, and he was grabbing her before she
knew he was up.
She swung with a single gasp, and her hand darted down for her knife, sweeping it up and toward him.
He barely caught the wrist sweeping forward. Then he had her firmly, bringing her arm back and up until
the knife fell from her fingers.
She screamed and began writhing, twisting her hard young body like a boa constrictor in his hands. But
he was stronger. He bent her back over his knee, until a mangled moan was coming from her speaker.
Then his foot kicked out, knocking her feet out from under her. He let her hit the ground, caught both her
wrists in his, and brought his knee down on her throat, applying more pressure until she lay still. Then he
reached for the pouch.
“Damn you!” Her cry was more in anguish than it had been when he was threatening to break her back.
“You damned firster, I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I do. And after I saved your miserable life…”
“Thanks for that,” he grunted. “Next time don’t be a fool. When you kill a man for his money, he
doesn’t feel very grateful for your reviving him.”
He started to count the money. About a tenth of what he had won—not even enough to open a cheap
poker den, let alone bribe his way back to Earth.
The girl was out from under his knee at the first relaxation of pressure. Her hand scooped up the knife,
and she came charging toward him, her mouth a taut slit across half-bared teeth. Gordon rolled out of her
swing, and brought his foot up. It caught her squarely under the chin, and she went down and out.
He picked up the scattered money and her knife, then made sure she was still breathing. He ran his
hands over her, looking for a hiding place for more money. It produced no sign of that, though he felt
other results inside himself. The witch was exciting enough, even when out cold. For a moment, he
debated reviving her, and then shrugged. She’d come to soon enough. If he bothered with her, it would
only lead to more trouble. He’d had enough.
“Good work, gov’nor,” the kid’s thin voice approved, and he swung to see the other getting up
painfully. The kid grinned, rubbing his bruise. “No hard feelings, gov’nor, now! They paid me to stall you,
so I did. You bonussed me to protect you, and I bloody well tried. Honest Izzy, that’s me. Gonna buy
me a job as a cop now, why I needed the scratch. Okay, gov’nor?”
Gordon hauled back his hand to knock the other from his feet, and then dropped it. A grin writhed onto
his face, and broke into sudden grudging laughter.
“Okay, Izzy,” he admitted. “For this stinking planet, I guess you’re something of a saint. Come on
along, and we’ll both apply for that job—after I get my stuff.”
He might as well join the law. He’d tried gambling—and the cheaters were gone, while he’d be
watched for at every gambling house crude enough to use such a fix on the wheel. He’d had his try at
fighting, and found that one man wasn’t an army. Reporting was closed to him permanently, on all the
worlds. And that left only his experience as a cop.
Anyhow, it looked as if Security had him trapped on Mars. They wanted him to police their damned
planet for them—and he might as well do it officially.
He tossed the girl’s knife down beside her, motioned to Izzy, and began heading for Mother Corey’s.
Izzy seemed surprised when he found Gordon was turning in to the quasi-secret entrance to Mother
Corey’s. “Coming here myself,” he explained. “Mother got ahold of a load of snow, and sent me out to
contact a big pusher. Coming back, the goons picked me up and gave me the job on you. Hey, Mother!”
Gordon didn’t ask how Mother Corey had acquired the dope. Probably someone had been foolish
enough not to pay for the proprietor’s guarantee of protection and had regretted it briefly. When the
Government had deported all addicts to Mars two decades before, it had practically begged for dope
smuggling—and had gotten it
The gross hulk of Mother Corey appeared almost at once. “Izzy and Bruce. Didn’t know you’d met,
cobbers. Contact, Izzy?”
“Ninety percent for uncut,” Izzy answered, and the puttylike old man nodded, beaming and rubbing
filthy hands together.
They went up to Gordon’s hole-in-the-wall, with Mother Corey wheezing behind, while the rotten
wood of the stairs groaned under his grotesque bulk. At his questions, Gordon told the story tersely.
Mother Corey nodded. “Same old angles, eh? Get enough to do the job, they mug you. Stop halfway,
and the halls are closed to you. Pretty soon, they’ll be trick-proof, anyhow. In my day, the wheels had
hand brakes, and a croop had to be slick about it to stop right. Now they’re changing over to electric
eyes. Eh, you haven’t forgotten me, cobber?”
Gordon hadn’t. The old wreck had demanded five percent of his winnings for tipping him off. And even
if it meant cutting his small stake to half now, he still had to pay it. Mother Corey had too many cheap
hoods among his friends to be fooled with. He counted out the money reluctantly, while Izzy explained
that they were going to be cops.
The old man shook his head, estimating what was left to Gordon. “Enough to buy a corporal’s job, pay
for your suit, and maybe get by,” he decided, his eyes seeming to clutch the money and caress it. Then he
tore them away. “Don’t do it, cobber. You’re the wrong kind. You take what you’re doing serious.
When you set out to tin-horn a living, you’re a crook. Get you in a cop’s outfit, and you turn honest. No
place here for an honest cop—not with elections coming up, cobber. Well, I guess you gotta find out for
yourself. Want a good room?”
Gordon dropped his eyes to the hole he’d called home for over a week, and his lips twitched. “Thanks,
Mother. But I’ll be staying inside the dome, I guess.”
“So’ll I,” the old man gloated. “Setting in a chair all day, being an honest citizen. Cobber, I already own
a joint there—a nice one, they tell me. Lights. Two sanitary closets. Big rooms, six by ten—fifty of them,
big enough for whole families. And strictly on the level, cobber. It’s no hideout, like this. But the gee
running it is knocking down till it won’t more than pay its way. Now…”
He rolled the money in his greasy fingers. “Now, with what I get from the pusher, I can buy off that hot
spot on the police blotter. I can go in the dome and walk around, just like you, cobber.” His eyes
watered slowly, and a tear went dripping down his nose, to hang pendulously. He rubbed it off with the
back of his hand.
Gordon had already heard some of the story of the man’s exile. In some earlier, more respectable
period of his life, Mother Corey had incurred the wrath of the mayor of Marsport and a trumped-up
charge of carrying a rifle inside the dome had been lodged against him. He retreated out here where the
police were weak.
The mayor had been killed soon after, and the charge could have been fixed easily then; Corey had
enough money to take care of it. But he’d stubbornly determined that he would use only funds obtained
somehow from looting the graft taken by the police. The dope Izzy was to unload must have been some
of that graft.
Mother Corey sighed gustily. I’m getting old. They’ll be calling me Grandmother pretty soon. And some
day, some punk will come and collect me. So I’m turning my Chicken House over to my
granddaughter—damned wench will probably steal the lodgers blind, too—and I’m going honest. Want a
room?”
Gordon grinned and nodded. It was worth standing the smell of Mother Corey to have someone around
who knew the ropes and who could be trusted within some limits. “Didn’t know you had a
granddaughter,” he said.
Izzy snorted, and Mother Corey grinned wolfishly “You met her, cobber,” the old man said. “The blond
who shook you down! Came up from Earth eight years ago, looking for me. Romance of the planets,
long-lost grandfather, all that slush. She needed a lesson, so I sold her to the head of the East Point gang.
Eventually, she killed him, and since then she’s been getting on pretty well on her own. Mostly. Except
when she makes a fool of herself, like her patching your suit up. But she’ll come around to where I’m
proud of her yet. If you two want to carry in the snow, collect, and turn it over to Commissioner Arliss
for me—I can’t pass the dome till he gets it, and you two are the only ones fool enough not to steal me
blind—I’ll give you both rooms for six months free. Except for the lights and water, of course.”
Izzy nodded, and Gordon shrugged. On Mars, it didn’t seem half so crazy to begin applying for a police
job by carrying in narcotics. He was only curious about how they’d go about contacting the
commissioner.
But that turned out to be simple enough. After collecting, Izzy led the way into a section marked Special
Taxes and whispered a few casual words. The man at the desk went into an office marked private, and
came back a few minutes later.
“Your friend has no record with us,” he said in a routine voice. “I’ve checked through his forms, and
they’re all in order. We’ll confirm officially, of course.”
He must have been one of the idealists once. His face was bitter as he delivered the lines, and he looked
seedy, unlike most of the men around the police office.
In the Applications section of the big Municipal Building at the center of the dome, the uniformed men
looked even better fed. Izzy and Gordon waited outside on a plastic bench for an hour, and then went in.
There was a long form to fill out at the desk, but the captain there had already had answers typed in.
“Save time, boys,” he said genially. “And time’s valuable, ain’t it? Ah, yes.” He took the sums they had
ready—there was a standard price, unless the examiner thought the applicant not suitable, in which case
it went up—and stamped their forms. “And you’ll want suits. Isaacs? Good, here’s your receipt. And
you, Corporal Gordon. Right. Get your suits one floor down, end of the hall. And report in at eight
tomorrow morning!”
It was as simple as that. Gordon was lucky enough to get a fair fit in his suit. He’d almost forgotten what
it felt like to be in uniform, and was surprised to find he stood straighter.
Izzy was more businesslike. “Hope they don’t give us too bad a territory, gov’nor,” he remarked.
“Pickings are always a little lean on the first few beats, but you can work some fairly well.”
Gordon’s chest fell. He suddenly realized again that this was Mars!
The first week taught him that, though it wasn’t too bad. The room at the new Mother Corey’s—an
unkempt old building near the edge of the dome—proved to be livable, though it was a shock to see
Mother Corey himself in a decent suit, using perfume to cover his stench. He’d even washed his hands,
though his face was still the same. And the routine of reporting for work was something that became
familiar almost at once.
He should have known the pattern. He’d seen it when he was on the Force on Earth, though not quite
the same. He’d turned up enough evidence when he was a beginning reporter. But it had always been at
least one step removed from his own experience.
The beat was in a shabby section where clerks and skilled laborers worked, with the few small shops
that catered to their needs. It wasn’t poor enough to offer the universal desperation that gave the gang
hoodlums protective coloring, nor rich enough to have major rackets of its own. But it was going
down-hill rapidly, and the teenagers showed it. They loitered about, the boys near a poolhall, the girls
hanging around a bedraggled schoolyard
that took up half of one block.
Izzy was disgusted. “Cripes! You can’t shake a school down. Hope they’ve got a few cheap pushers
around it, that don’t pay protection direct to the captain. You take that store, I’ll go in this one!”
The proprietor was a druggist, who ran his own fountain where the synthetics that replaced honest Earth
foods were compounded into sweet and sticky messes for the neighborhood kids. He looked up as
Gordon went in, his worried face starting to brighten. Then it fell. “New cop, eh? No wonder Gable
collected yesterday ahead of time. All right, you can look at my books. I’ve been paying fifty, but I
haven’t got it now. You’ll have to wait until Friday.”
Gordon nodded and swung on his heel, surprised to find that his stomach was turning. The man
obviously couldn’t afford fifty credits a week. But it was the same all along the street. Even Izzy admitted
finally that they’d have to wait.
“That damned cop before us!” he groaned. “He really tapped them! And we can’t take less, so I guess
we gotta wait until Friday.”
The next day, Gordon made his first arrest. It was near the end of his shift, just as darkness was falling
and the few lights were going on. He turned a corner and came upon a short, heavy hoodlum backing out
of a small liquor store with a knife in throwing position. The crook grunted as he started to turn and
stumbled onto Gordon. His knife flashed up.
Without the need to worry about an airsuit, Gordon moved in, his arm jerking forward. He clipped the
crook on the inside of the elbow while grabbing the wrist with his other hand. A pained grunt was driven
out of the man. Then he went sailing over Gordon’s head to crash into the side of the building. He let out
a yell.
And across the street, two loafers looked up, and echoed his cry. Gordon rifled the hood’s pockets,
and located a roll of bills stuffed inside. He dragged them out, before snapping cuffs on the man. Then he
pulled the crook inside the store.
A woman stood there, moaning over a pale man who was lying on the floor with blood gushing from a
welt on the back of his head. There was both gratitude and resentment as she looked up at Gordon.
“You’d better call the hospital,” he told her sharply. “He may have a concussion. I’ve got the man who
held you up.”
“Hospital?” Her voice broke into another wail. “And who can afford hospitals? All week we work, all
hours. He’s old, he can’t handle the cases. I do that. Me! And then you come, and you get your money.
And he comes for his protection. Papa is sick. Sick, do you hear? He sees a doctor; he buys medicine.
Then Gable comes. This man comes. We can’t pay him! So what do we get—we get knives in the face,
saps on the head—a concussion, you tell me! And all the money—the money we had to pay to get
stocks to sell to pay off from the profits we don’t make—all of it, he wants! Hospitals! You think they
give away at the hospitals free?”
She fell to her knees, crying over the injured man. “Papa, you hear? Papa! God, you hear me, please!
Don’t let Papa have concussions, don’t let them take him to the hospital!”
Gordon tossed the roll of bills onto the floor beside her, and looked at the man’s head. But the injury
seemed only a scalp wound, and the old man was already
beginning to groan. He opened his eyes and
saw the bills in front ,of him, at which the woman was staring unbelievingly. His hand darted out, clutching
it. “God!” he moaned softly, echoing the woman’s prayer, and his eyes turned up slowly to Gordon, filled
with something that should never have been seen outside of an archaic slave pen.
“In there!” It was a shout from outside. Gordon had just time to straighten up before the doorway was
filled with two knife-men and a heavier man behind them.
His hands dropped to the handcuffed man on the floor, and he caught him up with a jerk, slapping his
body back against the counter. He took a step forward, jerking his hands up and putting his
Earth-adapted shoulders behind it. The hood sailed up like a sack of meal being thrown on a wagon and
struck the two knife-men squarely.
There was a scream as their automatic attempts to save themselves buried both knives in the body of
their friend. Then they went crashing down under the dying body, and Gordon was over the top of them,
his fist crashing into the chin of the leader.
When the paddy wagon came, the driver scowled and seemed surprised. But Gordon hustled his
prisoners and the dead man inside. He wanted to get away from the soft crying gratitude of the woman
and the look in the storekeeper’s eyes.
The desk captain at the precinct house groaned as they came in, then shook his head. “Damn it,” he
said. “I suppose it can’t be helped, though. You’re new, Gordon. Hennessy, get the corpse to the
morgue, and mark it down as a robbery attempt. I’m going to have to book you and your men, Mr.
Jurgens!”
The heavy leader of the two angry knife-men nodded and grinned, though his look toward Gordon was
nasty. “Okay, Captain. But it’s going to slow down the work I’m doing on the mayor’s campaign for
reelection! Damn that Maxie—I told him to be discreet. Hey, you know what you’ve got, though—a real
considerate man! He gave the old guy the money back.”
They took Gordon’s testimony, and sent him home, since his time was up.
Jurgens set him straight the next day. The man was waiting for him when he came on the beat. From his
look of having slept well, he must have been out almost as soon as he was booked. Two other men
stood behind Gordon, while Jurgens explained that he didn’t like being interrupted on business calls
“about the mayor’s campaign or about anything else,” and that next time there’d be real hard
feeling—real hard. Gordon was surprised when he wasn’t beaten, but he wasn’t surprised when the
racketeer issued a final suggestion that any money found at a crime was evidence and should go to the
police. The captain had told him the same.
By Friday, he had learned enough. He made his collections early, without taking excuses. Gable had
sold him the list of what was expected, and he used it, though he cut down the figures in a few cases.
There was no sense in killing the geese that laid the eggs, and business wasn’t good enough to afford
both kinds of protection at that rate.
The couple at the liquor store had their payment waiting for him, and they handed it over without a
word, looking embarrassed. It wasn’t until he was gone that he found a small bottle of fairly good
whiskey tucked into his pouch. He started to throw it away, and then lifted it to his lips and drank it
without taking the bottle away. Maybe they’d known how he felt better than he had. Mother Corey’s
words about his change of attitude came back. Damn it, he’d given up his ideals before he left the slums
of his birth! He had a job to do—he had to dig up enough money to get back to Earth, somehow, unless
he wanted to play patsy for the Security boys.
He collected, down to the last account. It was a nice haul. At that rate, he’d have to stand it for only a
few months. Then his lips twisted, as he realized it wasn’t all gravy. There were angles, or the price of a
corporalcy would have been higher. And he could guess what they were.
One of the older men answered his questions, a gray-haired, stout corporal with sadism showing all
over his face. “Fifty per cent of the take to the Orphan and Widow’s fund, of course. Better make it a
little more than Gable turned in, if you want to get a better beat. You can squeeze ’em tighter than he did.
He was a softie!”
The envelopes were lying on a table marked “Voluntary Donations,” and Gordon filled his out, with a
figure a trifle higher than half of Gable’s take, and dropped it in the box. The captain, who had been
watching him carefully, settled back and smiled.
“Widows and Orphans sure appreciate a good man.” he said, ponderously humorous. “I was kind of
worried about you, Gordon. But you got a nice touch. One of my new boys—Isaacs, you know
him—was out checking up after you, and the dopes seem to like you.”
Gordon had wondered why Izzy had been pulled off the beat. He was obviously making good. But he
grinned, and nodded silently. As he turned to leave, the captain held up a hand.
“Special meeting, tomorrow,” he said. “We gotta see what we can do about getting out a good vote.
Election only three weeks away.”
Gordon went home, forgetting the conversation until the next night. He’d learned by now that the Native
Martians—the men who’d been here for at least thirty years, or had been born here—were backing a
reform candidate and new ticket, hoping to get a businessman by the name of Murphy elected. But
Mayor Wayne had all of the rest of the town in his hand. He’d been elected twice, and had lifted the graft
take by a truly remarkable figure. From where Gordon stood, it looked like a clear victory for the
reformer, Murphy. But that should have worried the police, and there was no sign of it. He didn’t give a
darn, though. Even with the take-out that left him only about thirty percent of his collection, he should be
able to get off Mars before the new administration came into power.
He went into the meeting willing to agree to anything. And he clapped dutifully at all the speeches about
how much Mayor Wayne had done for them, and signed the pledge expressing his confidence, along with
nodding at the implied duty he had to make his beat vote right. Wayne might get two votes from his beat,
he thought wryly. Then he stopped, as the captain stood up.
“We gotta be neutral, boys,” he boomed. “But it don’t mean we can’t show how well we like the
mayor. Just remember, he got us our jobs! Now I figure we can all kick in a little to help his campaign.
Nothing much—a little now and a pledge for the rest of the election. I’m going to start it off with five
thousand credits, two thousand of them right now.”
They fell in line, though there was no cheering. The price might have been fixed in advance. A thousand
for a plain cop, fifteen hundred for a corporal, and so on, each contributing a third of it now. Gordon
grimaced. He had six hundred left—and that would take nearly all of it, leaving him just enough to get by
on, if he didn’t eat too well, at Martian prices. And without the free room, he couldn’t have done it at all.
He wondered how often such donations were required.
A man named Fell shook his head. “Can’t do a thing now,” he said, and there was fear in his voice.
“My wife had a baby and an operation, and…”
“Okay, Fell,” the captain said, without a sign of disapproval. “Freitag, what about you? Fine, fine!”
Gordon’s name came, and he shook his head. “I’m new—I haven’t any real idea of how much I can
give, and I’m strapped now. I’d like…”
“Quite all right, Gordon,” the captain boomed. “Harwick!”
He finished the roll, and settled back, smiling. “I guess that’s all, boys. Thanks from the mayor. And go
on home…Oh, Fell, Gordon, Lativsky—stick around. I’ve got some overtime for you, since you need
extra money. Boys out in Ward Three are shorthanded. Afraid I’ll have to order you out there!”
Ward Three was the hangout of the Scurvy Boys—a cheap gang of hoodlums, numbering some four
hundred, who went in for small crimes mostly. They averaged too young to be used for goon squads or
for beating down strikes by infiltrating and replacing. But they had recently declared war on the cops,
who’d come under local pressure severe enough to force the closing of their headquarters.
After eight hours of overtime, Gordon reported in with every bone sore from small missiles and his suit
filthy from assorted muck. He had a beautiful shiner where a stone had clipped him. But he grinned a
little, as he remembered the satisfying sound of two heads thunking together before a third member had
joined and given the hoodlums a chance to get away.
The captain smiled. “Rough, eh? But I hear robbery went down on your beat last night. Fine work,
Gordon. We need men like you. Hate to do it, but I’m afraid you’ll have to take the next shift at Main
and Broad, directing traffic. The usual man is sick, and you’re the only one I can trust with the job!”
“But…”
“Can’t be helped. Oh, I know you’ve been on duty two shifts, but that’s the way it goes. Better report
to duty!”
He hadn’t handled traffic before, and it was rough, even with the minor traffic snarls here in Marsport.
In two hours of standing absolutely still, his feet were killing him. In four, his head was swimming.
He stuck it out, somehow. But it wasn’t worth it. He reported back to the precinct with the five hundred
in his hand and his pen itching for the donation agreement.
The captain took it, and nodded. “I wasn’t kidding about your being a good man, Gordon. Go home
and get some sleep, take the next day off. After that, we’ve got a new job for you!”
His smile was still nasty, but Gordon had learned his lesson.
The new assignment was to what had been the old Nineteenth Precinct, the roughest section in all
Marsport—the slum area beyond the dome, out near the rocket field. Here all the riff-raff that had been
unable to establish itself in better quarters had found some sort of a haven. At one time, there had been a
small dome and a tiny city devoted to the rocket field. But Marsport had flourished enough to kill off
lesser centers.
The dome had failed from neglect, and the buildings once inside it had grown shabbier. Men had looted
the worst of them and built crude shelters, some with only a single room that would hold air, many over a
mile from the nearest official water store.
Somehow, the people eked out a living. Most of them worked in the shops where the stringy vines of
native Mars plants were beaten into a sort of felt, glued together with adhesive from other plants, and
built up to form a substitute for the wood and plastic of Earth. The work was ill paid and unhealthy.
Slivers from the vines worked into the skin of anyone coming in contact with them, carrying with them the
slow poison of the glue. But despite the known risk, both adults and children formed long waiting lines for
the jobs.
It was a miserable section for everyone, including the police, but Gordon was trapped, and there was
nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t quit his job with the police; to do so would brand him as a
criminal. Some of Mars’ laws were rough, dating back to the time when law enforcement had been
hampered by the lack of men, rather than by the type of men attracted to it. Until he had enough money
to buy off his police contract, he was stuck with it for the full three year—Martian years, nearly double
those of Earth. No matter where they chose to assign him—or to punish him—he had to sweat it out,
much as he hated being stuck out there.
The people there had been complaining for years about the Stonewall gang. It was made up of the
lowest level of hoodlums, and numbered perhaps five hundred. They made their chief living by hiring out
members to other gangs during the frequent wars between gangs. But between times, they picked up
what they could by mugging and theft, with a reasonable amount of murder thrown in at a modest price.
Even derelicts and failures had to eat. And that meant that there were stores and shops throughout the
district which eked out some kind of a marginal living. They were safe from protection racketeers
there—none bothered to come so far out—except for the disorganized work of the Stonewall gang. And
police had been taken off the beats there for years, after it grew unsafe for even men in pairs to patrol the
area.
The shopkeepers and some of the less unfortunate people there had finally raised enough of a protest to
reach clear back to Earth, and Marsport had hired a man from Earth to come in and act as captain of the
section. No one from the city would take the job, and none of the regular captains could have coped with
it. Captain Whaler was an unknown factor. He’d sat tight for two months, and now was asking for more
men. And the pressure from the petty merchants and the itinerant crop prospectors was enough to get
them for him.
Gordon reported for work with a sense of the bottom falling out, mixed with a vague relief. There was
little chance for graft here. And Whaler discouraged even what there was.
“You’re going to be busy,” he announced shortly in the dilapidated building that had been hastily
converted to a precinct house. “Damn it, you’re men, not sharks. I’ve got a free hand, and we’re going
to run this the way we would on Earth. Your job is to protect the citizens here—and that means everyone
not breaking the laws—whether you feel like it or not. No graft. The first man making a shakedown will
get the same treatment we’re going to use on the Stonewall boys. You’ll get double pay here, and you
can live on it!”
He opened up a box on his desk and pulled out six heavy wooden sticks, each thirty inches long and
nearly two inches in diameter. There was a shaped grip on each, with a thong of leather to hold it over
the wrist.
He picked out five of the men, including Gordon. “You five will come with me. I’m going to show how
we’ll operate. The rest of you can team up any way you want tonight, pick any route that’s open. With
six patrolling you should be safe, and I’ll expect no great action until you’re broken in. Okay, men, let’s
go.”
Gordon grinned slowly as he swung the stick, and Whaler’s eyes fell on him. “Earth cop!” he guessed.
“Two years,” Gordon admitted.
“Then you should be ashamed to be in this mess,” the Captain told him. “But whatever your reasons,
you’ll be useful. Take those two and give them some lessons, while I do the same with these.”
For a second, Gordon cursed himself. He had fixed it so he would be a squad leader, even without his
corporal’s paid-for stripes. And that meant he’d be unable to step out of line if he wanted to. At double
standard pay, with normal Mars expenses, he might be able to pay for passage back to Earth in three
years—if Security let him, which it wouldn’t. Otherwise, it would take thirty.
He began wondering about Security, then. Nobody had tried to get in touch with him. He’d come here
and vanished. The first ten days, while staying at the old Mother Corey’s, that had been natural. But since
joining the force, they’d have no trouble locating him. Nobody had mentioned it, and nobody had asked
him questions that were suspicious.
If they were waiting for him to get on a soap box, they were wrong. But it worried him, suddenly, all the
same.
There was a crude lighting system here, put up by the citizens. At the front of each building, a dim
phosphor bulb glowed. It was still light outside, but darkness would fall in another half hour, and they
would have nothing else to see by.
Whaler bunched them together. “A good clubbing beats hanging,” he told them. “But it has to be good.
Go in for business, and don’t stop just because the other guy quits. Give them hell!”
Moving in two groups of threes, at opposite sides of the street, they began their beat. They were
covering an area of six blocks one way and two the other, which seemed ridiculous to Gordon. The gang
would simply hold off for a few days to see what happened.
But he was wrong about that. They had traveled the six blocks and were turning down a side street
when they found their first case, out in broad daylight. Two of the Stonewall boys, by the gray of their
sweaters under the airsuits, were working over a tall man in regular clothes and a newer airsuit. As the
police swung around, one of the thugs casually ripped the airsuit open with his knife and reached for a
pocket.
A thin screech like a whistle came from Whaler’s Marspeaker, and the captain went forward, with
Gordon at his heels. The hoodlums tossed the man aside easily, and let out a yell. From the buildings
around, an assortment of toughs came at the double, swinging knives, picks, and bludgeons.
There was no chance to save the citizen who was dying from lack of air. Gordon felt the solid pleasure
of the finely turned club in his hands. It was light enough for speed, but heavy enough to break bones
where it hit. A skilled man could knock a knife or even a heavy club out of another’s hand with a single
flick of the wrist. And he’d had practice.
He saw Whaler’s club dart in and take out two of the gang, one on the forward swing, one on the
recover. Gordon’s eyes popped at that. The man was totally unlike a Martian captain. And a knot of
homesickness for Earth ran through his stomach. They were tough by necessity here. But only old Earth
could produce the solid toughness of a man who had a job to do, instead of merely responding to
desperation.
He swallowed the sentimental nonsense, knowing it was true for him because he’d seen only one side of
Mars. His own club was moving now. Standing beside Whaler, they were moving forward. The other
four cops had come in reluctantly, but were now thoroughly involved.
“Knock them out and kick them down!” Whaler yelled. “And don’t let them get away!”
He was after a thug who was attempting to run, and brought him to the ground with a single blow across
the kidneys.
The fight was soon over. They rounded up the men of the gang, and one of the cops started off. Whaler
called him back. “Where are you going?”
“To find a phone and call the wagon,” the man said, his voice surprised at the stupidity of the question.
“We’re not using wagons on the Stonewall gang,” Whaler told him. “Line them up.”
It was sheer brutality. When the men came to, they found themselves helpless, and facing police with
clubs. If they tried to run, they were hit from behind, with little regard for how much danger the blow
meant. If they stood still, they were clubbed carefully to bruise them all over. If they fought back, the
pugnaciousness was knocked out of them at once.
Whaler indicated one who stood with his shoulders shaking and tears running down his cheeks. The
expression on the captain’s face was as sick as Gordon felt, but Whaler went on methodically, while he
gave his orders. “Take him aside. Names.”
Gordon found a section away from the others. It was just turning dark now, but he needed less light
than there was to see the fear in the gangster’s face. “I want the name of every man in the gang you can
remember,” he told the man.
Horror shot over the other’s bruised features. “I ain’t no rat! My God, Colonel, they’d kill me. They’d
stick a knife in me! No! No! I don’t know, Goddammit I don’t know!”
His screams were almost worse than the beating. But Gordon kept his face straight, and moved in
again. The other cracked, dropping to the ground and bawling. Between the other noises, names began
to come. Gordon took them down, and then returned with the man to the others.
Whaler took his nod as evidence enough, and turned to the wretched toughs. “He squealed,” he
announced. “If he should turn up dead, I’ll know you boys are responsible, and I’ll go looking for you.
Now get out of this district or get honest jobs. Because every time one of my men sees one of you, this
happens all over again. And you can pass the word along that the Stonewall gang is dead!”
He turned his back and moved off down the street, with the other police at his side. Gordon nodded
slowly. “I’ve heard the theory, but never saw it in practice. Suppose the whole gang jumps us at once?”
Whaler shrugged. “Then we’re taken. The old book I got the idea from didn’t mention that.”
Trouble began brewing shortly after, though. Men stood outside studying the cops on their beat. Whaler
sent one of the men to pick up a second squad of six, and then a third. After that, the watchers began to
melt away, as if uncertain of how many the police could summon.
“We’d better shift to another territory,” Whaler decided and Gordon realized that the gang had fooled
itself. They’d figured that concentrating the police here meant other territories would be safe, and they
hadn’t been able to resist the chance to loot—even to bring about a quick warfare in which they might
win.
There were two more muggings spotted, and two more groups were given the same treatment. In the
third one, Gordon spotted one of the men who’d been beaten before. He was a sick-looking spectacle,
and he’d been limping before they caught him.
Whaler nodded. “Object lesson!”
The one good thing about the captain, Gordon decided, was that he believed in doing his own dirtiest
work. When he was finished, he turned to two of the other captives, and motioned to the second
offender.
“Get a stretcher, and take him wherever he belongs,” he ordered. “I’m leaving you two able to walk for
that. But if you get caught again, you’ll get worse than he got.”
The police went in, tired and sore. There wasn’t a man in the squad who hadn’t taken a severe beating
in the brawls. But the grumbling was less than Gordon had expected, and he saw grudging admiration in
their eyes for Whaler, who had taken more of a beating then they had.
Gordon rode back in the official car with Whaler, and both were silent most of the way. But the captain
stirred finally, sighing. “Poor devils!”
Gordon jerked up in surprise. “The gang?”
“No, the cops they’re giving me. We’re covered, Gordon. But the Stonewall gang is backing Wayne
for the election, of course. He’s let me come in because he figures it will prove to Marsport that he’s
progressive and will get him more votes than he can win in the whole district out there. But afterwards,
he’ll have me out, and then the boys with me will be marks for the gang when it comes back. Besides, it’ll
show on the books that they didn’t kick into his fund. I can always go back to Earth, and I’ll try to take
you along—I guess we can chisel your fare. But it’s going to be tough on them.”
Gordon grimaced. “I’ve got a yellow ticket, and it’s from Security,” he said flatly.
Whaler blinked. He dropped his eyes slowly. “So you’re that Gordon? Sorry, I should have sent you
back to your own precinct, I guess. But you’re still a good cop.”
They rode on further in silence, until Gordon broke the ice to ease the tension. He found himself liking
the other.
“What makes you think Wayne will be reelected?” he asked. “Nobody wants him, except a gang of
crooks and those in power.”
Whaler grinned bitterly. “Ever see a Martian election? No, you’re a firster. He can’t lose! And then hell
is going to pop, and this whole planet may be blown wide open!”
It fitted with the dire predictions of Security, and with the spying Gordon was going to do, according to
them. It also left things in a fine mess. With Wayne out and an honest mayor in, there would be small
chance to get the fare he needed. With Wayne in, he’d be about as popular as a dead herring—and as
defunct, probably. He’d been a fool not to take the Mercury mines!
But curiously, he had no desire to back out and leave Whaler in the lurch, even if he’d had the power to
do so. He discussed it with Mother Corey, who agreed that Wayne would be reelected.
“Can’t lose,” the old man said. He was getting even fatter, now that he was eating better food from the
fair restaurant around the corner. Gordon noticed that he’d apparently washed his face and had trimmed
the wisps of hair. The widow in the small restaurant might have had something to do with that, though he
couldn’t imagine any woman showing interest in the monstrous hulk.
“He’ll win,” Corey repeated. “And you’ll turn honest all over, now you’re in uniform. Take me, cobber.
I figured on laying low for awhile, then opening up a few rooms for a good pusher or two, maybe a
high-class duchess. Cost ’em more, but they’d be respectable. Only now that I’m respectable myself,
they don’t look so good. Anyhow, I do all right. No protection from me—I know too much! But this
honesty stuff, it’s like dope. You start out on a little, and you have to go all the way.”
“It didn’t affect Honest Izzy,” Gordon pointed out.
“Nope. Because Izzy was always honest, according to how he sees it. But you got Earth ideas of the
stuff, like I had once. Too bad.” He sighed ponderously, letting his chins move sorrowfully, and squeezed
up from his huge chair to go inside. Gordon went to his own room and worried.
The week moved on. The groups grew more experienced, and Whaler was training a new squad every
night. Gordon’s own squad was equipped with shields now, since he’d remembered the ones on the
blond vixen’s gang, and they were doing better. The number of muggings and hold-ups in the section was
going down. They seldom saw a man after he’d been treated.
One of the squads was jumped by a gang of about forty, and two of the men were killed before the
nearest squad could pull a rear attack. That day the whole force worked overtime, hunting for the men
who had escaped, and by evening the Stonewall boys had received proof that it didn’t pay to go against
the police in large numbers. Kidneys and other organs were harder to replace than bruised flesh or
broken bones.
After that, the police began to go hunting for the members of the gang. By then they had the names of
nearly all of them, and some pretty good ideas of their hideouts.
It wasn’t exactly legal, of course. But nothing was, here. Gordon’s conscience was almost easy, on
that—whenever he had time to think about it. If a doctor’s job was to prevent illness instead of merely
curing it, then why shouldn’t it be a policeman’s job to prevent crime? Here, that was best done by
wiping out the Stonewall gang to the last member.
It could lead to abuses, in time, as he’d seen on Earth. But there probably wouldn’t be time for it, if
Mayor Wayne was reelected, as even the Native Martians seemed to feel he would be.
The gang had begun to break up and move, but the nucleus would be the last to go. The police had
orders to beat up a member of the gang now, even if he were merely found walking down the dirty street
for a pack of Marsweed. Citizens were appearing on the streets until it was fully dark for the first time in
years. And here, in this one section of Marsport, there were smiles—hungry, beaten smiles, but still
genuine ones—at the cops.
A storekeeper approached Gordon timidly at the end of the second week, offering a drink of cheap
native whiskey to break the ice. He took it, forcing it down. The other man hemmed and hawed, pulling
at his dirty gray mustache—a mannerism that seemed completely out of place when done through the
thickness of an airsuit.
Then he got down to business. “Hear there’s a new gang set to move in. Likely figure you won’t stop
’em, being so busy with the Stonewallers. Hear as there’s a gal running this one.” The man was both
scared and a bit ashamed to pass information to the police, but he was worried.
Gordon’s mind swept back to the blond granddaughter of Mother Corey, without prodding, and he
straightened. If the vixen was deliberately needling him—as it seemed, if the man’s story was true—she
had a debt to collect, all right—but not the one she expected. “Where?”
“Cain’s warehouse. Know where it is?”
Gordon nodded, and handed back the bottle. “Thanks, citizen,” he said. He must have sounded as if he
meant it, for reassurance and some measure of pride suddenly flashed onto the man’s face. He shoved
the bottle through the slit in his airsuit, drained it, and nodded.
Gordon considered getting a squad and going in for a mopping-up operation. By a little bit of
manipulation, it could seem that he was stumbling on her while looking for Stonewall members. But then
he remembered her crying over him as she patched his slit airsuit, and her apparently honest warning to
him in Fats’ Place.
Besides, while he knew she could be as dangerous as a man, he somehow couldn’t get over the idea
that she was only a girl. He started back to the precinct headquarters, then swung on his heel. It wouldn’t
do any harm to spy out the situation.
He made his way to the old warehouse building from the back, taking what cover he could. It was still
two hours until sundown, and the gang would probably be holed up. But he could at least find out
whether the building had been airproofed.
He found no evidence at first, until the sun glinted on a spot that seemed to glisten. It could be airproof
cement, put on too heavily, and spilling through. He slid around nearer to the street, where the view was
better, and began inching forward, using a heap of ruined foundation as cover.
He hugged it, moving around it, and started forward.
Something scraped against his suit.
He turned, but with the slowness of caution this time. It was a good thing. The blonde stood there, a
grin stretching her mouth into a thin line, and pure murder in her eyes. A knife was in her left hand, almost
touching the plastic of his uniform’s airproofing. In her right hand was one of the forbidden
guns—probably legal out here, but so rare on Mars that he hadn’t actually seen one until now. But she
looked as if she could use it.
“Drop the stick!” she ordered him. Her voice was low with some obscure passion. He had no way of
knowing it wasn’t fear—but it was more probably sheer desire to kill him.
The stick hit the ground. Her knife flashed, and he stepped back. “Looking for something—or
someone?” she asked.
He shook his head, trying to estimate his chances. They didn’t look good. “For you,” he told her,
forcing his voice to hold steady. “I couldn’t get you off my mind. When you wouldn’t come to visit your
poor old grandfather, I had to hunt you down. And now…”
Fury lifted her voice an octave. “Damn you, Gordon. Get down on your knees and crawl like a dog!
Crawl, damn you! When I save the life of a piece of scum, I want to see gratitude.”
“You’ve seen it, beautiful,” he told her. “Your own kind. Or don’t you remember the love tap, and the
little present we exchanged?”
For a second, he thought she was going to pull the trigger. Then she shook her head. “When they let the
air out of your suit, you should have died. I fixed that. But I can unfix it. Take off your helmet—and don’t
think I’m kidding this time. Take it off, you yellow firster, or I’ll puncture your belly—and then seal up
your suit again, so you’ll die slowly! Well?”
“Is that the way you killed your—ah—husband?” he asked her. He could feel the first trickle of sweat
on his forehead, and there was a cold lump in his stomach, but he held his grin. “I heard you settled that
out of court.”
She had gone white at the first words, and the gun in her hand jerked and trembled tautly. She tried to
speak, choked, and then bit out a single sentence, her eyes pin-points of hate.
“Take-it-off!”
He could feel the false amusement slip from his face, and a chill of fear wash over him. This time, she
meant it.
A man could live for a couple of minutes without a helmet…In that time…
He reached for it, loosing the seal, and beginning to lift it off. The air went out of it, spurting in little
clouds of frost as the expansion cooled it off, and froze the water vapor in it.
…In that time, the precious two minutes, he could do nothing. He’d been a fool. The effort of holding his
breath was too great, and his vision was already growing unfocussed.
“So long, baby,” he said, and hurled the helmet at her. The air exploded from his lungs with the words,
and for a minute everything began to turn black.
His nose had been bleeding from the change in pressure, and there was a taste of blood in his mouth.
Gordon licked his lips, and opened his eyes slowly, while the fuzziness gradually moved out of his mind.
He was lying on his back, staring at a grimy ceiling, and the air had a musty quality. By turning his eyes,
he could see that he was in a small, dimly lighted room, and that the hasty work of making it air-tight had
changed none of the ravages of time: the rottenness had simply been covered up with patches of
permaseal plastic, glued down to hold in the air.
The girl was squatting on her heels beside him, and the gun was in one of her hands, a knife in the other.
Her face was sullen now. But it firmed up as she saw that his eyes were open, and the knife twisted
pointing toward him. She opened her mouth, but he beat her to it.
“So you’re still soft underneath it all?” he challenged her. The words were thick on his tongue, and his
head had a thousand devils beating tom-toms inside it, but he ignored them ruthlessly. “Just because I
don’t cry and whimper, you can’t let me die. You had to lug me inside here to find out why, eh?”
Her face had frozen at the sound of his voice, but she seemed to pay no attention to his words. “Why’d
you laugh? Damn you, Gordon, why did you laugh when you threw that helmet?”
“Because I knew you’d have to find out why,” he told her. The surprising thing about it was that he
suddenly realized it had been true. He’d operated on a last-second hunch, and it had paid off. “I knew
you couldn’t let me die without finding out why I didn’t do what you expected. You’re still soft,
Cuddles.”
“Damn you! I’ll show you…” The knife whipped back in an overhand that no skilled fighter would use,
and then dropped as he managed to grin at her. “The name’s Sheila—Sheila Corey, and no cracks about
that!”
She stood up and began packing, keeping her eyes on him. She swung back to face him as he shoved
himself into sitting position. “You look like a human being. You bleed like one. But inside, you’re a
rotten, stinking machine!”
He grimaced at that. He’d been told that before. Compensation, he’d been told by the psychiatrist in
the Security office—a fear of being hurt that had begun in the slums as a kid and frozen him, until he
thought he couldn’t be hurt. He’d walled in the softness he should have had, until it couldn’t be reached.
He’d hidden his own feelings, and learned to disregard those of others. And the professions he’d
chosen—fighter, gambler, cop, reporter—had proved it.
“You’re just the sort that grandfather of mine would admire!” she finished hotly.
He laughed again, then, and her actions slipped into a slot he could understand. Before, she had been a
random factor. There’d been no reason why she should pick him out as her target. But he could
remember her passing them that first day, with Mother Corey so enraptured at the sight of the new deck
of reader cards that had reminded him of his own beginnings. To an outsider, it probably would have
looked as if Mother Corey had been taking the newcomer to his enormous bosom.
“And he doesn’t admire you, eh?” Gordon guessed. “He laughed at your romantic nonsense, didn’t he?
He sent you out to toughen up—and that must have been an experience! Too bad your—ah—husband
couldn’t control…”
A shrill whisper of a scream came from her lips, barely giving him warning as she charged. The gun
dropped from her fingers, and the knife lifted. She leaped for him, her knees striking the floor where his
stomach had been, and her clawed hand groping for his throat. The knife went all the way back and
began to come forward.
He got one hand up to her wrist, barely in time. The inertia of the blow carried the point of the knife to
the fabric of his suit. He forced it back, while his other hand jerked her fingers away from his neck. Then
she was a screaming, clawing madwoman, her lips snarled back to expose her teeth, while her sharp
canines snapped at his throat, slashed his wrist, and drove forward again and again. Her fingers were
raking at his face, tearing at his hair. And her whole body was a writhing knot of fury, as she tried to
swarm over him, beating at him with her knees and feet. She seemed to have at least a score of wild
limbs, and the governor on her internal motor had long since cut out.
His knowledge of the ring was useless—as useless as the dirty fighting he’d learned elsewhere. His mind
snapped all the way back to his slum childhood, and his body reacted as it had done when the
neighborhood tomboys had ganged up on him. He drove a sharp elbow against her breasts, slapped the
edge of his hand against the small of her back, and then grabbed for her legs and twisted. Her furious
snarling changed to a gasp, but before she could catch herself, he’d rolled out from under her. He
brought a knee up against the place where a sensitive gland in the groin lay between abdomen and leg.
His hands caught her arms, and he forced them back by sheer superiority of muscle, while his other knee
found the second tender gland. He let his weight rest there, changing his hold on her wrists from two
hands to one, and jerked her head back with the other.
He thumped the back of her head against the hard floor, and her agonized groans cut off. For a scant
second, she was out. He found the zipper on her Mars suit, jerked it down, and caught the shoulders of
the suit in his hands, bringing it down over her arms and pinioning them at the elbows.
Briefly, then, he hesitated. Her thin blouse had snapped partly open, exposing the upper part of her
chest. On it were lines and small scars, telling their own story of a captivity where the thug had clawed
and mauled her into temporary submission. No wonder she’d killed the devil! And the soiled edges of
her underclothing
told their own story of a girl who must have been neat once, but who was now forced
to live where even a change of clothing was too great a luxury, and where water was available only for
drinking.
He reached forward to straighten her blouse. She jerked to an abrupt steely stiffness, and gray horror
hit her face, while her eyes threatened to leap out of their sockets.
“No!”
It tore out of her lips like a board being ripped from a sawmill.
There was a sickness in him—the same sickness he’d felt when his first and only girl-friend had been
found killed at the hands of a maniac the parole board had decided was cured. He stood up, shaking his
head, and located the knife and the gun.
“Button your blouse, Sheila,” he told her. “And the next time don’t let a man goad you into going crazy.
All I wanted was your weapons—and I’ve got them.”
There was a total lack of comprehension in her eyes as she sat up and reached for the buttons. He
studied her, unsure of what to do next. Then, as she reached for the zipper on her suit, he shook his
head.
“Take it off,” he told her sharply. Without a suit, she would have to stay inside the hovel here until he
could make up his mind, at least.
Her face blanched, but she reached for the zipper, and began unfastening it. Her hands shook, but she
drew it down, and started to shrug her way out of the suit.
He stopped her, and again there was the sickness inside him. The few pitiful rags inside the suit were
totally incapable of covering her decently. It was a hell of a life for a woman—any kind of woman. He
wondered abruptly how many others he saw going about in their suits were in the same desperate
fix—and how many had sat futilely trying to patch what they had while the police and the gangs came
regularly for their graft.
He reached for the zipper himself, and drew it up. “Forget it. I guess your helmet’s all I need.”
Then she broke. Her legs seemed to buckle slowly under her, until she was sitting on the floor. Her
hands dropped to her sides, and her head slumped forward. She made no sound, but her shoulders
shook, and tears began to drop slowly to the dirty floor, leaving muddy splotches where they fell.
Gordon found his helmet and put it back on, cutting out the musty smell of the place. He picked up her
smaller plastic bowl and strapped it to his belt. Then he swung to look at her.
The tears were gone now, and she was on her feet, staring at him. “You damned human machine!” she
said, and her voice was flat and harsh. “I should have known. You wouldn’t even know what to do with
a woman if she didn’t care. You’re not even human enough for that! You—you robot!”
It hurt, inside him. But he sealed off the hurt of it almost at once. His lips twisted bitterly. “Your
gratitude’s appreciated, Cuddles. But I like my women feminine—and clean!”
Her hand hit the side of his helmet with a sharp splat. The red spots on her cheeks spread outward to
cover her face as she realized the stupidity of the gesture. Then she shrugged. “Go on, then, kill me and
get it over with. You might as well.”
“I’ll leave the killing to you,” he answered her. “You’ll be all right here, until I can send someone to take
you off in the paddy wagon.” He threw back the helmet, sniffing the air again, but there was enough
oxygen in it for several hours for her. Yet there was genuine fear in her eyes. He puzzled over it for a
second, before her glance at the knife he held triggered his mind.
In a way, she was probably right. He could imagine the type of gutter-sweepings she must have
recruited in her desperate attempt to set up a gang out here. If one of them came back and found her
without a weapon…
He broke the gun and removed the bullets from it, dropping them into a pocket of his suit. For a
second, he hesitated. Maybe he should take her with him. But that would mean turning her over to
Captain Whaler, who would see no difference between the men of the Stonewall gang and a woman
trying to set up another gang. Maybe there was no difference, but he still owed her a vague kind of
obligation because of her silly attempt to save his life the other time—and he preferred to fight his own
battles. This came under the heading of a personal feud. Anyhow, even if her men came back, they
would have no helmet to fit her. She’d keep, until he could come back—and a little waiting and worry
would be good for her.
He tossed her the gun, and started to go out through the dilapidated entrance port. Then he grinned, and
turned back.
“They’ll be as scared of it without bullets as with, if they don’t know,” he told her. “But this time, if I let
you keep it, I want to see some gratitude. Come here! And if you bite, I’ll knock your head off!”
Surprisingly, after a single instant of fury, she came quietly enough, even lifting her head toward him. He
dragged her shoulders around, and pulled her to him, bending down to lips that neither resisted nor
responded. Then he felt the beginnings of a response, and his hand dropped sharply to his knife, pressing
it down into its sheath before she could reach it.
He drew his head up, and the grin came back to his lips. “Naughty, naughty,” he told her.
She stamped her foot against the floor and jerked her head away. “Damn you! You stinking…”
But her head came up again, and her eyes met his. She fought back for a second as he pulled her to
him. This time, there was life and fire in her lips, and even through the suit he could feel her sway toward
him.
He straightened, snapped down the helmet, and was heading out through the entrance without a
backward look. It was night outside, and the phosphor bulbs at the corners were glowing dimly, giving
him barely enough light by which to locate the way back to the extemporized precinct house. He shook
the fuzz out of his head, grimacing at his own reactions. Well, the vixen had needed taming.
He reached the outskirts of the miserable business section, noticing that a couple of the shops were still
open. It had probably been years since one had dared risk it after the sun went down. And the slow,
doubtful respect on the faces of the citizens as they nodded to him was even more proof that Whaler’s
system was working, however drastic it might be. Gordon nodded to a couple, and they grinned faintly at
him. Damn it, Mars could be cleaned up…
He grinned at himself. Maybe Mother Corey was right; put a cop’s uniform on him, and he started
thinking like a cop. All this was fine, but it didn’t help him get back to Earth. Even at double pay, he still
wasn’t getting anywhere. The best place for him was still back under the central dome, where the
pickings were good.
Then something needled at his mind, until he swung back. The man was carrying a lunch basket, and
wearing the coveralls of one of the crop prospector crews, but the expression on his face had been
wrong. Gordon had noticed it from the corner of his eye, and now he saw the sullen scowl slip from the
man’s face abruptly and turn into a mixture of hate and fear.
Red hair, too heavily built, a lighter section where a mustache had been shaved and the skin not quite
perfectly powdered…Gordon moved forward quickly, until he could make out the thin scar showing
through the make-up over the man’s eyes. He’d been right—it was O’Neill, head of the Stonewall gang,
and the man they’d been trying hardest to find.
Gordon hit the signal switch, and the Marspeaker let out a shrill whistle. O’Neill had turned to run, and
then seemed to think better of it. His hand darted down to his belt, just as Gordon reached him.
The heavy locust stick met the man’s wrist before the weapon was half drawn—another gun! Guns,
suddenly, seemed to be flourishing everywhere. It dropped from the hand as the wrist snapped, and
O’Neill let out a high-pitched cry of pain. Then another cop came around a corner at a run.
“You can’t do it to me! I’m reformed. I’m going straight! You damned cops can’t…”
O’Neill was blubbering. The small crowd that was collecting was all to the good, Gordon knew, and he
let the man go on. Nothing could help break up the gangs more than having a leader break down in
public.
The other cop had yanked out O’Neill’s wallet, and now tossed it to Gordon. One look was
enough—the work papers had the tell-tale overthickening of the signature that had showed up on other
papers, and they were obviously forgeries. The cops had been accepting the others in the hope of finding
one of the leaders, and luck had been with them.
Some of the citizens turned away as Gordon and the other cop went to work, but most of them had old
hatreds that left them no room for squeamishness. When it was over, the two picked up their whimpering
captive. Gordon pocketed the revolver with his free hand. “Walk, O’Neill!” he ordered. “Your legs are
still whole. Use them!”
The man staggered between them, whimpering as each step jolted his wrecked body. If any of the gang
were around, they made no attempt to rescue him as he moved down the four blocks to the precinct
house. This was probably the most respectable section of Marsport, at the moment.
Jenkins, the other cop, had been holding the wallet. Now he held it out toward Gordon. “The gee was
heeled, Corporal. Must of been making a big contact in something. Fifty-fifty?”
“Turn it in to Whaler,” Gordon said, and then cursed himself for being a fool. There must have been
over two thousand credits in the wallet, a nice start toward his pile. He was hoping that Jenkins would
argue him out of his unreasoned honesty, but the other merely shrugged and stuffed it back into O’Neill’s
belt-pocket. It didn’t make sense, but the money was still there when they dumped the crook onto a
bench before Whaler.
The captain’s face had been buried in a pile of papers, but now he came around to stare at the gang
leader. He inspected the forged work papers, and jerked his thumb toward one of the hastily built cells,
where a doctor would look O’Neill over—eventually. When Gordon and Jenkins came back, Whaler
tossed the money to them. “Split it. You guys earned it by keeping your hands off it. Anyhow, you’re as
entitled to it as he was—or t